
It’s important to be in sync with the Proxibid technology to showcase your photos, hone your lot descriptions, and highlight your consignments for top bids on the leading portal! In the latest installment, Proxiblog laments bad auctioneer lot descriptions and praises the best in recent auctions. (Be sure to click pictures to expand and view lot descriptions below.)

Booyah BidAlot Auction! for noting that this U.S. Mint product box is damaged, lacking a cover. Depending on the product, such as a GSA Dollar Box, these items also have value.

Boo! to this auction house for neglecting to note the harsh cleaning on a purported deep mirror prooflike Morgan dollar. The photo is subpar and does not show luster. No coin is as beautiful as a DMPL Morgan and none has ugly when cleaned, as scratches mar the mirror surface, as probably the case here–assuming, of course, that this is a DMPL coin.

Boo! to this auction company for insisting on selling counterfeit and replica California fractional gold. Beware of these fake California gold products that have plagued the hobby since the 19th century. If you see a bear on the reverse without a dollar or fraction of a dollar designation, it is a fake.

Boo! to this unnamed auction house that sells vials of gold flake. The gold, if it is gold, is atomic level thin (one of the properties of gold is its malleability). If you run an acid test on the flake, it will dissolve. You are buying a vial of glitter not hardly worth anything except as decoration.

Boo! to this auction house for hyping bottom-tier and self-slabbed coins as worth gazillions of dollars, or $28,000 in this case, for an 1882-O that is not MS67 but most probably MS62-63, with bag marks readily visible even on the thumbnail photo. This auction house continually hypes these lots using PCGS values, another gross infraction.

Booyah Northern Illinois Coin! for noting damage, in this case, a wheelmark. This type of damage is often overlooked in the description. That’s not the case here.

Boo! to this auction house for not noting PVC Damage. That’s the green slime that happens with a coin reacts with an old plastic flip.

Booyah SilverTowne Auction! for noting rim damage on its coins. Would that more houses did the same!

Booyah RJ’s Auction! for a detailed list of coins in the descriptions, documented by visual evidence in clear, expandable photographs. A detailed description is always necessary when selling a set of coins, including any missing key dates. All of that is done here.

Booyah Star Coin and Currency! noting cleaning, so difficult to tell on a gold coin and almost always omitted from the description by a vast number of houses. Cleaning greatly devalues gold, by the way, and is especially important to note and also to depict in a sharp photo, as Star Coin does here.
Viewers can point us to other candidates for our “Boos & Booyahs!” series. Just leave a comment but follow our rules–all in good fun as a way to inspire accurate lot descriptions on Proxibid. Tomorrow we will showcase the best lot descriptions. Stay tuned!
Proxiblog is an independent entity with no connection to the auction portal Proxibid. Our intent is to uphold basic numismatic standards as established by the American Numismatic Association and the National Auctioneer Association and to ensure a pleasurable bidding experience not only on Proxibid but also on similar portals such as iCollector and AuctionZip.